Crusher Read Online Free Page B

yet but someone had killed my dad, and I just felt … curious?More bothered by the hows and whys than the fact my dad was dead. Until now, that is. When I looked at Prendergast I felt plenty. It was all coming back, the anger, the impotence, the feeling I was talking underwater, drowning where no one could hear me. And sheer bloody frustration that everything was stacked against me and the police didn’t give a shit about the truth—they just wanted to boost their clear-up figures.
    It had been years ago, when Dad and I had been really skint. I’d started walking the streets all night and hanging out with half a dozen dead-end no-hopers just like me. We’d go looking for trouble and if we couldn’t find any we’d make some, and one night we found someone’s stash of ketamine and coke abandoned in a park, and like a stupid fourteen-year-old punk I’d taken some to school and tried flogging it. And a kid in the year above who had once tried to bully me and got my fist in his mouth reported me and the cops came and some smug fat bastard just like Prendergast had decided I would make a great example to other lippy brats who stepped out of line.
    The school didn’t hesitate—I was already on their shitlist. The conviction for dealing had screwed what little future I’d had left. My last year of education was in a shithole with metal detectors at every doorway, a hotline to the local nick and a nursery for the babies of thegirls in Years Ten and Eleven. The kind of place where barely being able to read was par for the course. I left well before my seventeenth birthday and no one came after me to change my mind.
    “Ninety per cent of the time the person who reports finding a dead body is the murderer,” said Prendergast. “You might as well have written a confession in your stepfather’s blood. We’re going to get to the truth eventually. Save us all the sob stories and the pissing about, all right?”
    “You got it all wrong,” I said. “We didn’t argue. I just killed him because I was fed up looking at him. I wore two sets of gloves and a mask so you wouldn’t find any fresh DNA on the murder weapon. I changed my clothes afterwards, put the stuff with all the bloodstains in a plastic carrier bag with a brick and chucked the lot into the river on my way to work. You won’t find it. You won’t find any evidence, and in an hour or two you’re going to let me go home, because everything I just told you is inadmissible. You never cautioned me, you haven’t offered me a brief, you’re interviewing me with no other officer or adult friend or social worker present. Maybe when they do turn up I’ll tell them you stuck your hand down my trousers. Yeah, I’m dyslexic, but I’m not the one who’s thick as shit.”
    Prendergast was trying to smirk again, but underneaththose cracked capillaries in his cheeks his jaw was clenched. He had hoped this would be open-and-shut, that he could hector and bully me into a quick confession, because he had other things on his mind. He was too angry to be doing this job, it seemed to me. I half expected him to kick the chair back and have a swing at me; he was an old-fashioned copper. Let him, I thought, I could use the practice. I could take a punch, and at the very least I’d leave him with his nose in need of straightening.
    One or both of us were saved by the door opening, and Amobi standing there looking tense. “Sir,” he said. Prendergast ignored him, glowering at me. “DI Prendergast, sir,” said Amobi. “I need to speak to you a moment?”
    Prendergast snorted, pushed back his chair and stood up. The uniformed PC returned—no sign of any coffee—and sat back in his corner seat, not meeting my eye. There was an urgent, hushed conversation on the other side of the door. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I got the gist: Amobi, the uptight, fastidious junior detective, was trying to stay deferential while he laid into a senior officer for ignoring